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Catherine Zeta-Jones is quick to acknowledge how “fortunate” she has been in her decades of working onscreen.
“I was lucky where I got to do quite big commercial movies — that were artistic — early on in my career,” Zeta-Jones, 56, tells PEOPLE fresh off the premiere of her Sundance Film Festival entry The Gallerist. “I’ve never really done anything for the money.”
The Chicago Oscar winner rattles off the “bigger budget movies” that, in her words, “have still held some credibility,” like her 1998 breakout The Mask of Zorro or 1999’s Entrapment, a “big, fluffy heist movie.”
But, adds Zeta-Jones with characteristic flair, “There’s been a few in there — The Haunting — a few of them are like, ‘Eh.’”
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Horror feature The Haunting, costarring Liam Neeson, Owen Wilson and Lili Taylor, was director Jan de Bont and writer David Self’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Although a commercial success, it was a notorious critical flop.
“But generally,” continues Zeta-Jones, “I’d say I’ve got to work with some of the best, from Steven Soderbergh, who I’ve done three pictures with, to Steven Spielberg, to really interesting directors and actors.”
Soderbergh’s Traffic counts as both a scrappy artistic film with integrity and a mainstream hit, says the Welsh actress. “Even though it was a 40 million dollar movie,” she recalls with a laugh, “nobody really wanted to [support it] until it got nominated for Best Picture. And then everyone was like, ‘Yeah, I always believed in it!’ They didn’t.”
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For Zeta-Jones, “it helps to have done those big, ‘banger’ movies to be able to scrape in some money to do these jewels” like The Gallerist, she says.
Were there big-budget movies early on that she should have said yes to? “I was offered a lot in my early career, and sometimes I kind of think, ‘Eh, I should have done it,’” she admits. “But I didn’t.”
Zeta-Jones has been “very fortunate in my career,” she concludes, “in that I haven’t had to work. I’ve been working since I was nine years old, and so it was always a choice to go out there and leave my family, my husband and my home and go out and do work.”
In addition to The Gallerist, Zeta-Jones’ upcoming projects include reprising her role as Morticia Addams in Netflix’s Wednesday and leading Prime Video series Kill Jackie.
